All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [28]
We were roommates in New York City for a while, twenty years ago; at the time he always liked me, he said, because I was “a feminist who could still wear pink socks.” We started a little romance that fizzled out after an awkward sexual encounter. For years I thought it was my fault—I was young and inexperienced and worried I wasn’t sexy enough or doing things right. Finding out that he was a she, all those years later, was, selfishly, a relief—and a Note to Self that when things don’t work out with a man, you can’t always blame yourself. So that was all good. Going shopping with her, on the other hand, was annoying as hell, since everything fit her perfectly—she’s a biological male after all—while everything was too tight on my curves, proving that designers have a warped and probably misogynistic sense of the female form.
In any case, after a year, I almost forget that she was ever a he. When the editor calls with the Samoa assignment, I can hardly claim to be an expert in the topic of the social-versus-biological construction of gender, but having dug around in that territory, I am fascinated. I even have a third cousin who is married to a Samoan, so I have a place to start—though being fundamentalist Christians, my cousins are a little confused when I call them asking if they know any Samoan drag queens. But they’re helpful, and I’m as excited as the young Margaret Mead to be heading off to Samoa.
AT THE AIRPORT in Upolu, I glance around, and, in their similar dress, it’s hard to tell Samoan men and women apart—especially since the women have big biceps encircled with tattoo armbands and the men have luxurious long black hair and gold-hooped ears. Samoans of both genders are big-boned, hearty types, evolved from people who were strong enough to paddle from island to island to survive, who were quick enough to escape rival tribes, and who fed on the starchy breadfruit and taro roots that grow everywhere on the islands. They’re like tropical flowers—big, bright, and meaty, with a humid, amorphous sexuality.
I find a battered lime green taxi, shell necklaces dangling from the rearview mirror, greet the driver—“Talofa!”—and set off with a squeal. We whiz by thatched huts on stilts near the beach, nut brown children laughing and playing in bright blue waves. The villages are tidy, with a profusion of bougainvillea, red ginger, pink hibiscus, and exotic flowers I’ve never seen. The place exudes relaxation, as if the vibrant colors are soaking up all the available intensity.
We arrive in Apia, where modern offices stand next to palm-thatched houses, rickety food stands, and open-air markets. Near the center of town, across the street from the harbor, we pull up at Aggie Grey’s, an incongruously stately, rambling, white colonial hotel with bellhops in red uniforms out front. This place, the oldest hotel in town, was built decades ago, when adventurers wanted a civilized respite between their forays into the savage wilds and World War II GIs needed a real hamburger for a change. After the war, it became a chic getaway for the Hollywood set, farther even than Tahiti, where stars like Gary Cooper, William Holden, and Marlon Brando could sit by the pool and know that no one could possibly know who they were, except that they were rich.
I’ve arranged lunch with a famous Samoan fa’afafine. An anthropologist gave me her name, along with some background about the fa’afafine, which means “in the way of a woman.” Men who openly dress as women are an accepted part of life in Samoa, are treated as women, and play the same roles in Samoan culture as genetic women: caretakers, teachers, Bible school leaders. They’re also entertainers, able to get away with doing some of the things women used to do in Samoa that have been frowned on since Christian missionaries came around 1830,